Rheinfeldplatz Sculpture Symposium, Kaiserlauten, Germany
The initial inspiration was a corridor in a large old industrial building where a friend had a studio in the south of Spain. A broken light flickered in the spooky gloom of this corridor.
During the symposium I made the passage form from a single block of stone by sawing and splitting it and removing its central mass. I then made the ominous form and set it in the passage…I found this to visually complicated … my work is usually quite visibly uncluttered, informed by both minimalism and a Japanese aesthetic (I lived in Japan for 4 years in the 1980’s).
So I dispensed with this form…however the experience of working in the quarry in the depths of the forest, and travelling through the forest in early morning light, with long shadows and rays of light coming through avenues of trees had begun to alter my intentions of the piece. Co-incidentally I was reading a book by the African writer Ben Okri, set in a town in the middle of a dreamlike forest. He made some very insightful quotes about the nature of the forest and its relationship with the human psyche, myths, dreams and spirits. I decided to use the central block, removed from the middle of the piece in the creation of the passage space, as a part of the sculpture and onto this vertical form, juxtaposed with the horizontal passageway, I engraved a quote by Ben Okri.
